LAND OF
THE INFIDEL
_Anno Domini 1263-1264
Year of the Hegira 661-662_
"Whoso fighteth in the way of God, be he slain or be he victorious, on
him We shall bestow a vast reward."
--The Koran, Surah IV
"Nothing is true. Everything is permissible."
--Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah,
founder of the Hashishiyya
I
In the mist-filled plains around Lucera, cocks crowed.
Daoud ibn Abdallah pushed himself slowly to his feet. After days and
nights of walking, his legs ached abominably.
Tired as he was, he looked around carefully, studying the other
travelers who rested near him on the road, peering at the city wall a
hundred paces away with its shut gate of iron-studded oak. In his
stomach he felt the hollow ball of dread that had not left him since he
landed in Italy.
_I am alone in the land of the infidel._
Dawn gave a pink tint to the pale yellow stones of the wall, about twice
the height of a man. Above it in the distance, covering the summit of
the central hill, rose the citadel of Lucera, surrounded by its own huge
wall set with more than a dozen many-sided towers.
Daoud's feet throbbed in his knee-high boots. For three days he had
walked along the carter's track from the port of Manfredonia on the
Adriatic coast into the hills around Lucera. Yesterday at daybreak he
had been able to see, from a great distance, the outline of the fortress
emerging from the center of a rolling plain. It had taken him another
day and a night to reach its gate.
Around Daoud now were dozens of people who had gathered at the gate
during the night, mostly merchants with packs on their backs. A few
farmers, hitched to carts loaded with melons, peaches, and oranges, had
dragged their burden over the plain. The more prosperous had donkeys to
pull the wagons.
One man with a long stick drove six small sheep. And a cart near Daoud
was piled high with wooden cages full of squawking chickens.
Walking in his direction was a tiny dwarf of a man who appeared
permanently doubled over, as if his back had been broken. It seemed to
Daoud that if the man were not holding his arms out from his sides for
balance, his knuckles would almost have brushed the ground. His little
cart was piled with broken tree limbs, firewood to sell in the city.
The dwarf lifted his head and grinned at Daoud through a bushy black
mustache. Daoud smiled back, thinking, _God be kind to you, my friend_.
From within the city issued a familiar cry, in Arabic, that tore at
Daoud's heart: "Come to prayer. Come to security. God is most great." It
was the adhan, the cry of the muezzins in the minarets of Lucera's
mosques. For, though he was in a Christian land, Lucera was a city
mostly populated by Muslims.
Daoud wanted to fall to his knees, but he was pretending to be a
Christian, and could only stand and ignore the call to prayer as the
Christians around him did. He said the words of the salat, the required
prayer, in his mind.
The people near Daoud spoke to one another sleepily, softly, in the
tongue of southern Italy. Someone laughed. Someone sang a snatch of
song. When the Muslim prayer ended, they expectantly looked up at the
town wall.
Daoud saw two soldiers standing in the tower to the left of the gate.
They were accoutred in the Muslim manner, with turbans wrapped around
their helmets and scimitars at their belts. One lifted a long brass
trumpet to his lips and blew a series of notes that sent shivers along
Daoud's spine. With a few changes it could have been the call that had
awakened him every morning in the Mameluke barracks on Raudha Island in
the Nile.
Using ropes, the other soldier hoisted onto a tall pole a yellow banner
bearing a black bird with spread wings and claws, and two heads facing
in opposite directions. The double-headed eagle of King Manfred's
family, the Hohenstaufen.
With a great squealing of cables and squeaking of hinges, the tall
wooden door swung wide.
Daoud reached down and picked up the leather pack that had lain between
his feet. Leaning forward, he pushed his arms through the shoulder
straps.
He wore draped over his pack a long countryman's cloak of cheap brown
wool. His tunic and hose were of lightweight undyed cotton. Only his
high boots were expensive. He needed good ones for the long walk from
the coast to Lucera. A sword swung at his belt, short and unadorned, the
sort any man of small means might wear. He had chosen it in El Kahira
out of a stack of swords taken from Christian men-at-arms during the
last crusade.
He drew the hood of his cloak over his head. Later his blond hair and
gray eyes would guarantee that no one would suspect what he was. But
here in southern Italy, where most ordinary people were dark
complexioned, his appearance might draw unwanted attention.
Even though the sun had just risen, he felt the heat on his back. But it
was not the dry heat of Egypt that he had known most of his life. A
heaviness in the air called forth a dampness from within his flesh. His
tunic clung to him.
_If a Christian asks me what month this is, I must remember to say
July._
He brushed the dust from his clothing and fell into line behind the bent
man with his cart of firewood.
Once inside Lucera, he would find his way to the inn of al-Kharim. And
tonight the chancellor Aziz would come to him from King Manfred.
The line shuffled forward. Three guards were standing in the shadows
just inside the gateway. They were big dark men wearing long green capes
over red tunics. Red turbans were wrapped around their spike-topped
helmets. Curving swords hung from their belts. A boy in a red tunic and
turban held a sheaf of lightweight spears.
Their thick beards reminded Daoud how much he missed his own beard,
shaved off in preparation for this mission.
_My people._ Daoud felt a sudden warmth at the familiar sight of
warriors of Islam.
The feeling was nonsense, he told himself. These were not his people,
but the Saracens of Manfred von Hohenstaufen. Their Arab ancestors had
once ruled southern Italy, but the Christians had conquered them over a
century before.
No, these Muslim warriors were not Daoud's people. In truth, on this
whole earth there were no people Daoud ibn Abdallah could truly call his
own.
* * * * *
Once he had been David Langmuir, living with his crusader father and
mother, in a castle near Ascalon by the plain of Gaza. An English
ancestor had been one of the first crusaders in the Holy Land.
Just after David's ninth birthday Geoffrey Langmuir, his father, had
ridden out to war in gleaming mail with a cross of red silk sewn on his
white surcoat. David never saw him again.
Some weeks later the Saracens appeared before the castle, and there
were days of thirst and hunger and constant fear. He remembered the
thunderous pounding at the walls and the dark men in their yellow robes
and green turbans, their crescent-shaped swords coated with blood. He
remembered his mother, Lady Evelyn, in her blue dress, running up the
spiral stairs of a tower. He heard her distant scream. When the Saracens
dragged him out of the castle, with men being cut down by swords all
around him and women thrown to the ground by laughing Turks who fell
upon them, he saw at the base of the tower a bundle of blue linen
splashed with red that must have been his mother.
On their leisurely journey back to the Nile, the Turks forced him to lie
on his belly, and they used him as men use women. He would never forget
the needle-sharp tip of a curving dagger touched to his eyeball as a
bashi with a flowing black beard demanded that Daoud use his mouth to
give him pleasure. Whenever Daoud remembered that time, his insides
knotted and his face burned with shame.
One day he stood naked on a platform in El Kahira, capital of the
sultans--the city the Christians called Cairo. A fat, laughing slave
dealer, who had raped him till he bled the night before, offered him for
sale.
A tall man with one eye a glittering blue and the other a blank white, a
scimitar in a jeweled scabbard thrust through the embroidered sash
around his waist, came forward.
A silence fell over the crowd of slave buyers, followed by whispers. The
one-eyed warrior paid the price asked in gold dinars and without
haggling. And when the slaver fondled David's loins one last time as he
covered him with a ragged tunic, the warrior seized the slaver by the
throat with one hand, forcing him to his knees, and squeezed till he
collapsed unconscious in the dust of the marketplace.
David was almost mad with terror as the one-eyed warrior took him to his
mansion beside a lake in the center of El Kahira. But the tall man spoke
kindly to him and treated him decently. Amazingly, he could speak
French, David's language, though with a strange and heavy accent. He
told David that he was called Baibars al-Bunduqdari, Baibars the
Crossbowman. He was an emir of the Bhari Mamelukes, which meant, he
said, "slaves of the river." But though the Mamelukes were slaves, they
were also great and powerful warriors.
Baibars gave David a new name--Daoud--and told him that he had selected
him to be a Mameluke. He explained in a firm but kindly way that Daoud
did have a choice but that the alternative was a life of unrelieved
wretchedness as a ghulman, a menial slave. As a Mameluke, Daoud would be
set free when his training was complete, and he could win riches and
glory and be a warrior for God and his emir.
"I have long watched for such a one as you," Baibars said, "who could
look like a Christian but have the mind and heart of a Mameluke. One
like you could be a great weapon against the enemies of the faith."
_But your faith is not my faith_, David, who was to be called Daoud,
thought, not daring to speak, _and your enemies are not my enemies_.
His longing to please this man, the first Muslim to treat him with
respect, struggled as the years passed with his memories of a Christian
childhood. Daoud underwent the training of a Mameluke, and Baibars
watched him closely. Daoud accepted Islam and took the common surname of
a convert, ibn Abdallah. He took naturally to the life of a warrior and
grew in strength and skill.
Year by year Baibars, too, became more powerful. At last he made himself
sultan of El Kahira, ruler of an empire that stretched from North Africa
to Syria. Daoud's hand had wielded the flame dagger of the Hashishiyya
that ended the previous sultan's life.
Now, having raised Daoud, trained him as a Mameluke, and educated him in
statecraft, having sent him to learn wisdom from the Sufi and terror
from the Hashishiyya, having given him a new name and a new faith,
Baibars had sent Daoud into the Christian country called Italy.
* * * * *
The stones of the gateway seemed to be marble, unusual for a
fortification. Daoud noticed large iron rings set at intervals under the
arch. His feet crunched on fresh straw.
The space under the arch was about ten paces from outer portal to inner.
On one side a broad-shouldered official sat at a table. The man glanced
up at Daoud, looked down at a leather-bound ledger in which he was
writing, then raised his eyes again for a longer look. This time the
brown eyes met Daoud's.
The official's grizzled hair formed a cap of curls around his head,
hiding his ears. He had a thick mustache, black streaked with white. His
shirt of violet silk looked costly. On the straw beside him lay a huge
dog, doubtless bred for hunting, with short gray fur, forepaws stretched
before it like a sphinx.
_These people live with unclean animals_, Daoud thought with distaste.
When the official leaned back in his chair, Daoud saw the long, straight
dagger that hung from his belt in a scabbard decorated with crossed
bands of gold ribbon.
Fear tightened Daoud's throat.
_Will this man see through me? Will he guess what I am?_
_Come, come_, he chided himself. _You have gone among Christians before.
You have walked in the midst of crusaders in the streets of Acre and
Antioch. You have landed on the island of Cyprus. You have even gone as
Baibars's emissary to the Greeks of Constantinople. Commend yourself to
God and cast fear aside._
He visualized what the Hashishiyya called "the Face of Steel within the
Mask of Clay." What he showed this official would be his Mask of Clay,
the look and manner of the merchant he was pretending to be. Beneath it,
unseen, was his true face, a Face of Steel forged over years of bodily
and spiritual training.
The mustached man allowed most of the people in line to pass into the
city after a few quick questions.
Daoud's heartbeat quickened and he tensed when his turn came to pass.
"Come here. Lower your hood," the man said.
Walking slowly toward him, Daoud reached up and pushed back his hood.
The official raised thick black brows and beckoned to a guard. "If he
makes a move you do not like, skewer him."
"Yes, Messer Lorenzo."
Daoud felt a stiffness in his neck and a knot in his belly. King
Manfred's chancellor, Aziz, had written that Daoud would be quietly
admitted to the town.
The heavyset, black-bearded Muslim soldier took a spear from the boy
standing near him and leveled it at Daoud, his face hard.
"Now then," said Lorenzo, "give us your sword."
This overzealous guard captain, or whatever he was, was paying too much
attention to him. But to avoid more attention, he must readily
cooperate. He unbuckled his sword belt and held it out. Another Muslim
guard took it and stepped beyond Daoud's reach.